Louis: People's intentions cannot be, on the whole, more bad than good. Were we to believe otherwise, we would inevitably cease to trust each other, and no society can survive without mutual trust among its members.
The argument is most vulnerable to which one of the following criticisms?
(A) It fails to rule out the possibility that a true belief can have deleterious consequences.
(B) It mistakenly assumes that if two claims cannot at the same time both be true, then they cannot at the same time both be false.
(C) It challenges the truth of a claim merely by calling into question the motives of those who profess that they believe it to be true.
(D) It assumes without any warrant that in any situation with two possible outcomes, the most negative one will inevitably occur.
(E) It provides no reason to believe that a statement that is true of a given group of individuals is also true of any other group of individuals.
Answer: (A).
It is very easy to arrive at (A) by elimination because the others are poor contenders.
However, why (A) is correct is worth analyzing.
The conclusion here is that people's intentions cannot be, on the whole, more bad than good. The conclusion is obviously to be held as a true belief, so the "were we to believe otherwise" bit turns it into a false belief.
Holding the false belief leads to negative things that finally end in extinction of society.
False belief -> Negative things that end in extinction of society
does not rule out
~ (False belief) -> Negative things that end in extinction of society
(or)
does not rule out
True belief (conclusion) -> Negative things that end in extinction of society (deleterious consequences), which is what (A) says.
The possibility that the true belief of the conclusion still leads to the negative things that end in the extinction of society renders the argument unsound.
ASIDE: As an analogy, consider the statement that those who believe in God (G) are saved (S).
G -> S only renders the contrapositive ~S -> ~G true always
It does not rule out ~G -> S
because there may be some who do not believe in God (~G) but are still saved (S). Those who are saved (S) definitely include all those who believe in God (G) and may include at least some of those who do not believe in God (~G). What is true for sure is that if one is not saved (~S), then one definitely does not believe in God (~G).
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